The Divorce of Henry VIII by Catherine Fletcher

Author:Catherine Fletcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448156221
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

11

The Daily Frauds of the Brothers Casali

BY MAY 1530, Croke had added corruption and betrayal to his compendium of Casali wrongdoing. His friends believed, so he said, that Giambattista Casali was a papal spy, while Gregorio was demanding money to pay scholars whose services he, Croke, had already retained. His suspicion was fuelled by reports from Girolamo di Vicenza, Bishop of Vaison, who had lodged with Giambattista. The bishop told Croke (or so the latter wrote) that ‘the Casali had often told him that they regretted that the king had embarked on this cause and that they had always opposed it’.1

If Giambattista had actively been hindering the king’s cause, one person who should have been interested was Rodrigo Niño, Imperial ambassador to Venice. Yet Niño’s reports on the matter are far from conclusive. Initially, in June 1530, he was rather enthused by Giambattista’s apparent distaste for Henry’s activities. The pair had met at the annual festival marking Ascension Day, when the Doge, elective ruler of Venice, celebrated the city’s ritual marriage to the sea. It was a spectacular event dating back to Byzantine times or perhaps even beyond. After a Mass in San Marco, the Doge sailed out on Venice’s flagship, the state barge known as the Bucintoro, to the church of Sant’Elena, followed by a procession of lavishly decorated boats carrying the worthies of the city. There, the patriarch of Castello waited in a gilt-trimmed barge to give his blessing; bells rang and the chapel choir sang. The Doge then sailed to the port of San Nicolò, which marked the channel between the lagoon and the sea, where he threw a gold ring into the water in the culmination of the rite, saying, ‘We espouse thee, O sea, as a sign of true and perpetual dominion.’2

Such occasions were often convenient for informal discussion among the ambassadors who accompanied the Doge, and this one was no exception. Niño reported that Giambattista had made ‘great excuses’ for himself and his brother, declaring their disapproval of the king’s proceedings and how they had fallen into disgrace with Henry for telling him so. Moreover (and in confirmation of the Casali–Ghinucci rivalry), Giambattista had blamed Ghinucci and his colleagues in Bologna for ‘all the mischief’. The emperor should believe, wrote Niño, that every day, the Casali ‘find themselves more embarrassed in this odious business’. But later, in a letter of 28 June 1530, Niño backtracked. Giambattista, he now said, had been ‘very active in promoting the king’s interests’, although he added the rider: ‘though owing to his being a vassal of the Pope suspicion generally attaches to him’. A month on, he reported a further conversation with Giambattista, in which the latter implied that he was unhappy about the divorce business, but begged Niño ‘for the love of God’ to keep the knowledge to himself, for fear that the king ‘would have his life and his brother’s’ if this (and likewise their Ascension Day conversation) became known.3 This last picture of Giambattista swerving between

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